Illustrations of Dickens's Hard Times
by Sol Eytinge, Junior

In anticipation of Dickens's long-awaited 1867-68 reading
tour, which had been postponed by the American Civil War, the Boston publisher
James T. Fields had commissioned from Eytinge ninety-six designs for
wood-engravings to grace the pages of the exhaustive Diamond Edition of
Dickens's works, each volume being of compact dimensions with very fine but
sharp type. This volume, moreover, coincided that momentous visit to American
shores.

On the verso of the title-page is the statement that James T. Fields, the
author's friend and confidant, so valued since it authorized his firm as
Dickens's sole representatives in the United States:

Gad's Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent,
Second April, 1867.
By a special arrangement made with me and my English Publishers (partners with
me in the copyright of my works), MESSRS. TICKNOR AND FIELDS, of Boston, have
become the only authorized representatives in America of the whole series of
my books.
CHARLES DICKENS.

William Winter in his autobiography recalls that Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s
illustrations for Dickens's works "gained the emphatic approval of the
novelist" (318), although of course the pair did not actively collaborate on
this series, as did Hablot Knight Browne
and Dickens had done for so many of the full-scale novels in twenty monthly
parts, concluding with the illustrations
for the Chapman and HallA Tale of Two
Cities in 1859. The limited Fred Walker narrative-pictorial sequence
for the 1868 Library Edition of Hard Times
reveals genuine insights into a novel never before illustrated,
particularly the
study of Mr. Harthouse and Tom Bounderby [sic] in
the Garden. Nevertheless, as one regards this series of six individual and
group character studies for Hard Times (1867) and
appreciates them as exemplars of the new realism of the the sixties' manner of
book and magazine illustration, one is tempted to agree with Winter that

The most appropriate pictures that have been made for illustration
of the novels of Dickens, — pictures that are truly representative and
free from the element of caricature, — are those made by Eytinge. . . .
[317-318]